Just Weather

“By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather.”- Toni Morrison, Beloved

One of the things that first surprised me when I moved to Minnesota over a decade ago was how often, and with such deadpan sincerity we talk about the weather. It’s among the common neighborly niceties exchanged around here. A thing we all seem to agree on. To talk about Minnesotans talking about the weather is itself a pat cliché. But it makes it no less true. After all, we are a people who don’t just endure the frozen air and the seasonal cycle of natural death and deep winter, but manage to thrive in it. And while I am, personally, equally intolerant to the intense cold of Minnesota’s legendary winters as I am to its breathless summers, there’s a hardiness I’ve come to adore about a state whose people know what it is to weather. 

For I, too, come from people who know how to weather: hurricanes and the hold of a slave ship, volcanic ash and colonial violence, harmattan winds and imperialist-backed tyranny, monsoon rains and revolutions. 

In the days and weeks that have followed the occupation in Minnesota, community members, organizers, and neighbors walk their salt-encrusted boots into the little bookstore I own in downtown Rochester and we exchange observations on another kind of weather. 

It’s ICE-y today... 

It’s been hot over in southeast…

I run a Black-owned bookstore. It’s the only one of its kind in all of greater Minnesota. And as of January 9th, it’s been its own small hub of community activity and resistance. I am not surprised in the least by the way that Minnesota bookstores have shown up. Witnessing the collective work of bookstores in the Cities over the last month and a half has made me braver, made my tongue sharper, my vision clearer in this small city I call home.  

Two days after the murder of Renee Nicole Good, two local organizers visit the store and add me to Signal and WhatsApp threads of neighbors. Within hours, I become fluent in a meteorology measured by ICE vehicle sightings, grainy photographs outside apartment complexes and our immigrant-owned grocery stores, punctuated by oraciones y bendiciones, and requests for food deliveries and legal observers. Hundreds of messages fill the chat of community members sheltering in place, others patrolling, sending mutual aid information, offering school pick-ups and supply distribution, mostly in Spanish. An ecology of relation, care, and protection in the wake of a violent climate. 

The networks I’ve seen emerge most quickly, and with the most agility in my community are those facilitated by people of color—primarily, women of color. The immigrant, Indigenous, Black, Brown, and queer networks that became visible last month did not just spring into being overnight. They are lineages of accumulated survival, of communities that have long learned to read the weather and not only build shelter within it, but nourish a different micro-climate, a counter-climate altogether. 

On one of the coldest days in January, I help dozens of community members drag boxes and over-packed paper grocery bags into the shop’s children’s room that only months before had served as a pop-up food pantry in the wake of the SNAP benefits freeze. With a blustery wind stalking me through the hallway of the building, I stack the overflow of donations beside old bikes in the garage behind the unit. There’s no heat in the bookstore.  There hasn’t been for two winters. I’ve been apologizing all day for how cold it is. But the saffron accent wall, the honey-hued wicker and rattan, the hanging plants and walls of books seem to create their own atmosphere no matter what the weather is outside. I feel the sweat slide down my neck and into my scarf as I warm my hands by the space heater, surveying the tower of diaper boxes by the door next to the nonfiction shelves. James Baldwin, a young Arturo Schomburg and MLK Jr., Marsha P. crowned in flowers, an enigmatic Octavia Butler, a laughing Malcolm X, Toni Morrison in profile, a quilted Harriet Tubman portrait, and a smiling Audre Lorde and Grace Lee Boggs peer out from the book jacket covers. 

Some weather we’re having. 

They, too, lived through weather much like this. The climate largely unchanged. It’s a kind of climate we are much less likely to talk about in Minnesota or anywhere else in the nation. And it’s killing us all, albeit at different rates. 

In In the Wake: On Blackness and Being Christina Sharpe describes an all encompassing, all consuming “weather” of anti- Blackness and white supremacy. This weather simply is, has been. We breathe it in in the morning air. It is all that is left in the wake, in the afterlives of settler colonialism and enslavement. She writes, “The weather is the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is anti-black. And while the air of freedom might linger around the ship, it does not reach into the hold, or attend the bodies in the hold.” Writing in the context of colonial occupation, Frantz Fanon also explored how occupation itself creates a literal hostile atmosphere charged with violence that in turn constricts, suffocates, takes life. The federal ICE occupation in our state is layered upon a lineage of occupation in these unceded lands of the Dakota and Ojibwe.

For Sharpe, the weather cannot be changed and she rejects heady fantasies that purport to. Instead, she highlights what we do in the afterlives, what we do in the wake of it all. On the surface, I’ve often struggled with this– wanting us all to descend like a white-haired Storm and alter the winds and air, smash the ship after all are freed from the hold. And isn’t our collective imagination already in a hold? The same carceral hold that structures ICE violence, detentions, surveillance, police brutality, and mass incarcerations.  But for both Sharpe and Fanon, there is a profound throughline that leads back to the body, to the breath, to the living and the dead and ecologies of resistance in a Black space-time where the past is ever-present. 

My own body often feels like it exists in the wake of ancestral and collective afterlives. My shoulders feel the generational weathering of things I am not entirely sure are mine alone in this lifetime. Within my Blackness sits my connection to my identity as a 1.5 generation immigrant and daughter of Cameroonian, Afro-Costa Rican, and Indian immigrants. Inside my Blackness also sit my branching, broken tongues as a heritage speaker of Spanish and some barely passable pidgin. I have taken to carrying my passport with me in a ziploc bag with my whistle. But it offers little comfort. I am just as afraid of needing to pull it out to prove some arbitrary belonging in exchange for my life as I am about an agent reading “Dominican Republic” beneath the “Place of Birth” line and coming to deadly conclusions. My body holding too many lush excesses that were never meant to survive the noxious air of this nation. 

And I admit, I am tired of weathering.

Weather has a lineage. The atmosphere has a memory of two to four weeks. Over generations, weather patterns shaped by cyclical phenomena like El Niño/La Niña create their own lineages of related weather conditions exacerbated by human-caused climate change. Hurricane forces that begin in the Sahara desert and still follow a well-worn, haunted path along the Middle Passage route to the Americas are shaped by this phenomena as are the tornadoes of the midwest and the severity of our winters here in Minnesota.

We often regard the weather as something upon which we have no control as something that just happens or is an isolated singularity. Climate justice advocates would beg to differ. So what does it mean to attend to the material climates through which settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and the prison industrial complex distribute violence? As much as we talk about the weather, weather is never equally experienced. Storms follow fault lines already carved by enslavement, displacement, extraction, containment, and incarceration. Heat islands, data farms, food deserts, redlines, border walls, prison walls all become atmospheric technologies that regulate who may breathe easily and who must labor for air. 

Historians credit a disastrous tornado that razed the little village of Rochester, Minnesota on August 21, 1883 leaving several dead and two hundred gravely injured for the birth of the Mayo Clinic. We who live in Rochester now, live in the wake of that history. Alongside that history also sits structural injustice whose reverberation still impacts area Indigenous communities and echo through historic spaces like our Avalon building and in old racial housing covenants and stark economic disparities. Rochester is a city whose land mass is nearly the same size as Minneapolis and St. Paul, but whose population sits barely above 120,000. It is a city that is primarily known as the home of the Mayo Clinic-- the state's largest private employer. And the institution looms large over us all. Its toothless, benevolent shadow long and intractable. It’s a city not known for its history of resistance or protest. But rather for a shiny self-identity centered around being healers, a healing city. A city made inherently “good” and absolved by the presence of the hospital and all who work in it. As if our country’s healthcare system did not have its own forgotten lineages of medical apartheid and violence to reckon with and vanquish. But that, too, is just part of the weather now. 

ICE agents have already detained community members on their way to medical appointments here. Somali elders cannot access their usual home healthcare services or medications. Community members in our "MedCity"are terrified to seek medical care. Just a block from the bookstore, a recent kidney transplant patient was forcibly removed from his car by ICE as he was making deliveries to other neighbors. He was sent to Whipple without his medication. His damaged car with groceries bags still in the passenger side and pink children’s shoes in the back seat left deserted, cast off. Debris left in the wake of a violent storm not everyone agrees is even here. 

Because here in Rochester, we don’t all agree on the weather anymore. Are we really occupied? Is ICE even here? The occupation has manifested differently here than in the Twin Cities. Working in a mode that I suspect is truer to how it might continue to look long after any “drawdown”. A quieter, but no less insidious force that will easily become as normalized as our frigid, gray winters if we let it. And in key ways, we already have. 

I fear the routine collective forgetting that will allow this all to become just weather. Barely a breeze of the “disremembered and unaccounted” for. The forgetting that fails to see that this so-called “moment” is part of a climate that has been. This weather is ancestral. This climate summons us by all the old names and the nascent ones still covered in the thick vernix of rebirth, the beautiful and broken names, the lost names we have not yet dared to carry. 

For better or worse, I see lineages all around me. Lineages of violence and tyranny, but of abolition and liberation, too. 

In many Afro-Atlantic cosmologies it is believed that storms carry ghosts, spirits and change in their wake. In the Yoruba tradition, Oya is the orisha of winds, storms, weather, and transformation. Turbulent and swift, she also has dominion over the dead and the doorway between this world and the after, the next. Storms make change unavoidable, inevitable and in these belief systems there is always an opening that emerges. 

I think of what is left in the wake of all this. Of the ghostlands of those who are still detained, of neighbors who have been in hiding, of families separated, of those in the hold where the “air of freedom” cannot yet reach. The afterlives of the seismic trauma of the last sixty five days and counting that will haunt our homes, streets, neighborhoods, classrooms, and cities for generations. The weather has always been trailed by its own spirits, its own ghosts that demand careful tending and full reckoning with. 

I think of the microclimates and ecologies of resistance at work all around us too. Fanon’s “combat breathing” kept swirling in my tired head the other night as I struggled to steady my own breathing in the wake of weeks of activation. I, myself, am still learning how to breathe properly. How not to hold my breath for minutes, days, years at a time. And again, I think of the ghosts in the winds, the spirits trailing weather patterns, the change in the wake. Material and metaphorical lineages kicking up their own storm within me. For both Fanon and Sharpe, there is “wake” work, resistance work, care work, grief work, that happens in the perpetual wake. It requires breathing life back into ourselves and each other even within a climate structured by domination. And in so doing we might dismantle the structure itself, transform the climate. 

I have not been able to shake the feeling of haunting thick in the atmosphere lately. Laced in the winter chill this last month. I feel it even now in the early thaw of the last few days. There are, of course, the spectres of state-sanctioned violence, and brutality whose roots are ages deep, birthing new forms of themselves in the cloud cover. But I also feel the air crackling with ancestral blessings and reminders on how we alchemize grief and hold care. On how we might yet breathe. They whisper names of the unaccounted for, the disremembered. I see us collectively breathing in their offerings, lineages of solidarity and revolution. The kind that knows how to sit at a deathbed and surround a casket in cry-songs and feed hundreds of mourners at a repast, a diehouse, a vigil. The kind that knows how to name the dead and how to honor the living. The kind that seeds imagination. The same kind that brings the water and the sambusas to the protest and neighborhood patrols. The kind that delivers groceries and forms a crowd, the shrill sound of whistles piercing the winter air. The kind that knows how to not only weather this, but to attend to the hold. They breathe life back into me and into the next world.